Dr. Seema Mishra, faculty of the Department of Biochemistry, School of Life Sciences, University of Hyderabad (UoH) has designed potential vaccine candidates, called T cell epitopes, against all the structural and non-structural proteins of novel coronavirus-2 (2019-nCoV) for experimental testing. These vaccine candidates are small coronaviral peptides, molecules which are used by cells to trigger an immune response to destroy cells harboring these viral peptides. Using powerful immunoinformatics approaches with computational softwares, Dr. Seema Mishra has designed these potential epitopes in a way that can be used to vaccinate entire population.
Usually, vaccine discovery takes 15 years but the powerful computational tools helped in quickly enlisting these vaccine candidates in about 10 days. A ranked list of potential candidate vaccines, based on how much effectively they will be used by human cells to stop the virus, has been generated.
